@TF: It really is, but it's an awesome kind of terrible thanks to Schwarzenegger. If "Rises" is a beautiful, dark dream, then B&R is the weirdass dream where you remember something about a banana and a shark and a talking chocolate sunglasses, and it was hilarious and scary at the same time, and you don't really want to have the dream again but you don't regret having it.

I actually saw TDKR over the weekend. I managed to suspend some elecments of disbelief

but the bit that had me going "wait a minute" was the fact that he spent the first third of the movie limping with a walking stick, then we see him put on a set of knee braces that allowed him to kick holes in walls, but you never saw those braces again! there were numerous scenes of him leaping about the place without his exo-knees. I actually myself pissed off about that and not the other things!

Now that I've stirred on TDKR a bit, I'll say that I think it's a good movie. However, I do not think it is a good Batman movie.

To start with, it seemed to forget the point of ending to TDK wasn't just to turn Dent into a hero, but for Batman to be able to truly strike fear into the hearts of criminals. Him retiring for seven years misses out on that completely. Also, now that a couple favorable laws past and Joker's been put away, there's just no more crime in Gotham? And I don't buy the reasoning that he was too sad for seven years over the death of Rachel. Tragedy is fuel for the Batman. I suppose it is sort of the point that he only starts being Batman at the end of the movie, but then he just gets bitch-stabbed and quits. And Blake is going to become the new Batman with all his extensive training that every other cop in Gotham has? I'm also not sure if it bugs me more than Batman quit, or that Alfred quit and along with not saying anything snarky.

And to add to the bits about plot holes and inconsistencies and what not: Did nobody notice that Batman and Bruce Wayne came back at the same time (for the second time) and then died at the same time? Why was his leg even damaged? They mentioned something about the cartilage but didn't seem to explain it. The rest of his body was in perfect shape. Was the world really okay with the US doing nothing for five months? Wouldn't there have been a very significant amount of fallout from that goddamn nuclear blast? Why did Talia even bother telling them that she flooded the cave? If she let them find out on their own, they would have realized she'd won right before dying a horrible death.

@ DJ Stawes - yup. I wish those were the only problems with this movie. I think it's interesting that there are a lot of people who point out these and many other problems with the movie and still say they think it's a "good" or "well made" movie. I can understand that they would say that they liked the movie, but in spirit of critique, it's kind of counter intuitive. I mean I liked "The Dark Knight", but those action scenes are really muddled and aren't (in the technical sense of film making) well done.. Here is a critique that an editor did of an action scene in "The Dark Knight" that is very well done and is extremely informative:

http://vimeo.com/28792404

I guess what I'm saying is that I think there is a difference of liking a film and judging whether a film is well done or not.

I was 100% indifferent to TDKR but I haven't seen the first two movies in a really long time. I think perhaps it works best as a final part to the trilogy and not so much as a stand alone film. That said...

It lost me at the spine punching. I just... REALLY? His vertebrae are sticking out of his back, you can physically see them and one strategically placed punch later he's back to fighting fit within a matter of MONTHS? Well enough to repeatedly jolt it by tying a rope around your middle and jumping... oh fuck it I give up. Maybe that doctor was just fucking with him.

And could you really calculate the deterioration of nuclear matter to the exact second or did I just not understand that entire bomb thing?

I don't generally like to pick plots apart too much, but the whole thing felt sort of... shoddy to me. I think maybe I need to watch it again and re-assess.

Again I urge you all to read Darren's blog them0vieblog.com(zero not an o in movie) for his superlative review of Batman. You know sometimes you read a really good book, and then a professor lectures on it and you see things in it that resonate with other things and feel all the things you missed. The way Cronenberg completely missed DeLillo's Cosmopolis along with all the reviewers and academics. It is a marvelous wonderful book which reveals and conceals all of its resonances.

the "super-braces" were on under his clothes, whether in the Batsuit or his normal Wayne clothing. IIRC, we never saw Bale's bare legs again after that one scene

@ Badbear

Clearly that guy in prison was there for tax evasion for the huge fees he collected while being the most awesome chiropractor the world had ever known. It's bits like that where you have to go, fuck it. It's a movie.

And no, you can't calculate nuclear decay anywhere near that precisely. Honestly, that was kind of stupid. It'd have made more sense if there had been some kind of timer triggered by the deaths of Bane or Talia or something.

You know, I have a number of problems with their take on the movie, and all of them are emblematic of my wider problems with the apologies being made for the film's themes. You will note, for example, that the article on the one hand claims that it's totally absurd to compare the film to Occupy, and yet later on describes Bane's army as "the darkest desires of the “Occupy” movement carried well past the extreme." The darkest desires? That's a little hard for me to swallow, because it presupposes the legitimacy of the right wing fears of insurrection, that secretly what Occupy wants to do is burn down the world.

I mean, to defend this movie on the grounds of theme and political stance is to ignore that rather striking point when Selina Kyle's friend/accomplice/lover? remarks that "Now this is everyone's house!" I mean, that's the right wing boogeyman, the spectre of evil Socialism. It's not nuanced, it's not subtle, it's not even subtext, it's just, "look how scary it is when we start redistributing the wealth! Thank goodness the billionaire in the bat suit is going to rally the army of cops in order to restore the natural order of things!"

A lot of the defenses I've seen suggest that the true message is that the truth lies somewhere in between the left and right, but when you've got a country where the left wing is, from what I understand, more like the right wing of many European nations, and the right wing thinks that science is a trick of the devil, the middle ground argument is, to my mind, indefensible--and certainly nowhere near as interesting as the deep, primal themes of fear and control present in the previous two films.

But here, while we're posting links, I think Julian Darius of Sequart does a far better job of explaining just why the politics of the film are so warped than I can here. And, for that matter, Film Crit Hulk does a good, if uncharacteristically short, breakdown of how oddly contradictory the film is. (Oh, and I did some analysis of it, too, but those two hit most of the points I made and did it in a far more articulate way.)

I do differ from Darius in one respect, though--I think the film simply isn't articulate enough to have a repugnant political stance. Like I said before, it isn't working with subtext at all, it's just text, and half the time the text contradicts itself. This is particularly notable since neither of the previous films were so confused. In fact, The Dark Knight brilliantly pitted two ideals against one another in such a way that the contradictions were integral to the fundamental thematic conflict. Here, there's no embodiment of an ideal on either side, just a bunch of people saying things that sound profound but don't add up to anything.

Again, though, Film Crit Hulk does a better job of articulating this thematic hollowness than I can.

@TF:

Ah, that's a fair point. Yeah, I can't deny that it's a bizarre contradiction. I kind of want to say that it's Nolan's sexlessness in his films, but that seems uncharitable, to say the least. Now I'm trying to think back, though, to the male fanservice in the film, though. I didn't really register much either way (I mean, my heart flutters each time I see Loki, but I don't think Whedon was going for that, exactly) but I'm wondering if it's a difference between just the overall sexual energy, for lack of a better term, between the two directors?

I also find it hard to compare because the Marvel films have overall seemed much more interested in setting the men up as sexualized characters than the women, and that kind of colors my perceptions a bit.

You basically summed up my thoughts on the Nolan's female characters, though.

EDIT: Ugh, sorry for the essay length post. It's that English major impulse to just never shut up about anything plaguing me again...

@William Joseph Dunn: As I said earlier, I think the reason why we care so much about the flaws in this movie is that those things really stick out like sore thumbs among what's otherwise a really entertaining and - at times - engaging movie. If I liked the movie despite its flaws, I can still call it a good movie. Just not a GREAT movie. And "Rises" is definitely not a great movie.

Unsure how accurate it is in depiction schizophrenia in comparison to Antichrist and Melancholia and their depictions with Anxiety Disorders and Major Depression and/or Dysthymia, but it looked to me much better than other major movies have treated it (A Beautiful Mind comes to *cough* mind)